Silicon Valley Tech Women held a panel at the shiny new SalesForce offices in downtown San Francisco entitled Leveraging Social Networking to Advance Your Career. See the photos  from DJ Cline here.

I moderated this panel of tech rockstars.

• LaSandra Brill  Sr. Mgr., Global Social Media Marketing,  Cisco Systems
• Marilyn Lin Director, Product Intelligence & Enablement, Salesforce.com
• Erica Lockheimer  Sr. Engineering Manager, LinkedIn
• Jana Messerschmidt VP of Business...

Last night I moderated a very interesting panel for the San Francisco American Marketing Association on marketing automation. It was an great group for this kind of discussion and I wanted to share some of the takeaways with you. Anyone interested in digital marketing needs to understand these concepts, whether you use automation tools or not.

On the panel:
Jason Miller – Marketo
Kim Stieglitz – Vertical Response
Lindsay Mahoney – Silverpop
Sean Stoffstall –...

Oh boy, here’s a hot button topic for you. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)  was created with good intentions. When it was passed in the mid 1980′s it was intended to protect us from fraud by making it illegal to use someone else’s password for a social media site, a website or even their computer (even at their request).

What’s the big deal? Well, if you work for your clients on multiple accounts on social networks, websites or even log into their computer as a...

Klout recently announced the addition of Instagram interaction and Bing searches to their algorithm. While I don’t take Klout scores as the be-all end-all of social value, it’s still a useful metrics tool when evaluating how much an individual or a brand engages with the rest of the world.

I see that my Klout score did jump a bit when they made this change, though Bing is not showing up yet in my score. Actually I use Bing very rarely, I prefer Google, even after I took the ...

A social business could be most simply defined as a business which engages with it’s customer base socially. It used to be all businesses were social. You made friends in the neighborhood and responded to their interests or you failed. Today we may think it has to mean they use social media, but there’s more to it than that. Just having millions of followers, fans and “interactions” on social networks doesn’t make you social.

Talking to your customers, listening to...

The popularity of Instagram is clear, and if you are inclined to snap photos and share them with your friends and customers on social networks you can make your business more social and build a powerful sharing community on Instagram quickly.

Why does Instagram work so well? Because we humans are most inspired by visuals. According to our friends at Hubspot, 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than text.

Instagram is easy...

By Frank Strong
His sleeves were rolled up. His tie was loose. He swore.  It was all public.

It may sound like a recipe for disaster for any CEO edgy enough to take center stage in a content marketing strategy…except when it works.

Armed with $9.8 million in new venture funding, Dollar Shave Club CEO Mike Dubin spent some of that money on a YouTube video that cast him in the leading role. The company earned an incredible amount of media coverage which put the company on the map. As of the...

Oh boy, another “how to grow your Twitter following” post! If you came here looking for an easy way to get thousands of followers without lifting a finger, move on. You’re in the wrong place. If you really want to grow a Twitter following that has any value as a network,  there’s no way around it. You’re going to have to work for it. That’s OK though, because what I’m going to tell you here is really the fun part. You grow your network organically by...

The Pew Research Center recently released a phone study conducted by PRSAI of over 1,000 users in the US. The report that states that while 2 out of 3 Americans are Facebook users 61% of those users have voluntarily taken a break for a period of several weeks or more.

• 20% of those surveyed said they used the site once but no longer do.
• Only 8% of those who don’t use Facebook now are even interested in using the site in the future.

So why did so many users take a self-enforced...

I was part of a discussion on Twitter this morning around this post of George Snell’s.” Community Management Isn’t Content Creation. (go read it now and come back).

Now,  I don’t 100% disagree with him that not all community managers are suited to create content. But it’s such a gross generalization.

To tell great stories you have to stop having your community managers produce your content.

Really??

Some CEO’s can’t create content either, and they let...